World Cup Rivalry Bot — AI-Voiced Hype for Every Goal

Gbolahan Olawunmi — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:10:46 +0000

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition

What I Built

I built the World Cup Rivalry Bot — a Telegram bot for fans who want their World Cup rivalry to feel alive in their own group chat. You set your team and your rival, and whenever a real goal happens in the tournament, the bot fires back an AI-generated hype line in your team's voice — followed by an imagined clapback from the rival's fans, spoken in a completely different voice.

It works in DMs and in group chats, and each person in a group can root for their own team independently. Since World Cup passion isn't just about scoring — it's about the back-and-forth banter between rival fans — I wanted the bot to capture both sides of that rivalry, not just one team's celebration.

Demo

Try it on Telegram: @worldcup_rivalry_bot

Quick flow:

/start → set your team (e.g. /team Brazil)
/rival Argentina
/autohype → the bot starts watching real World Cup 2026 results for both your team and your rival
/simulate or /simulaterival → instantly demo the celebration pipeline without waiting for a real goal

Code

GitHub: https://github.com/Gbolaww/worldcup-rivalry-bot

How I Built It

The bot is written in Go and runs as a single long-polling process against the Telegram Bot API, deployed on Railway.

A few decisions worth calling out:

Two voices, two AI models working together. Every goal celebration is a two-part exchange: Google's Gemini generates a short hype/trash-talk line for whichever team scored, and a second, different clapback line from the other side's perspective. Each line is converted to speech with ElevenLabs, using two distinct voice IDs — one for the "home" team's fans, one for the rival's — so it genuinely sounds like two different people talking past each other, not one narrator switching sides.
Real tournament data, not mocked results. The bot polls a public, free World Cup 2026 dataset to detect when a tracked team's goal total increases, and auto-fires the celebration — no manual trigger needed once /autohype is on. Since that data isn't second-by-second live, I added /simulate and /simulaterival so the exact same detection-and-celebrate code path can be demoed instantly, without waiting on an actual goal.
Per-user state, not per-chat. Team and rival are tracked by Telegram user ID rather than chat ID, so a group of friends can all use the bot in the same group chat, each rooting for their own team, without stepping on each other's setup.
Getting the AI stack working was its own adventure. Both gemini-1.5-flash and gemini-2.0-flash were already fully deprecated by the time I built this, and ElevenLabs had recently locked free-tier API access to preset "library" voices — so most of Saturday went into just finding which models and voices were actually still available before I could write a single hype line.

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